American Sniper: Propaganda and turning an American Psycho into a War Hero of the People

By Christopher Barr │POSTED ON JANUARY 21, 2015

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.  If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat.  If you know neither the enemy not yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” 

- Sun Tzu, The Art of War

“Just because war is hell doesn’t mean you can’t have a little fun.” 

- Chris Kyle

American Sniper, directed by Clint Eastwood, is a war movie about a man with a talent for precision sniper shooting that is deployed to Iraq after the September 11, 2001 attacks.  Chris Kyle finds out about his deployment while at his wedding in the midst of celebrating his union with his, soon to be annoying, complaining all the time, wife. This scene happens in so many action movies that here it comes off as hollow.  Chris Kyle was responsible for killing 255 people, 160 of which were officially confirmed by the Department of Defense.  This movie is a celebration of all those kills and never discusses the moral cost of killing so many people.

The movie, lacking pathos and insight, is based on Chris Kyle’s bloodthirsty, unapologetic, zero regret, autobiography American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History.  The very fact that it is an achievement worth celebrating really shows how far down the rabbit hole Americans truly are.  This marksman perched himself of a roof and picked off ‘the evildoers’ one by one.  He became known as the ‘Legend’ by his fellow Navy SEAL brethren and soon by most of the military forces.

Where to begin with the propaganda oozing from this six time Oscar nominated movie.  American Sniper is a commercial for going to war and killing terrorists without ever really knowing why or caring to know why for that matter.  It’s a jingoistic and xenophobic thoughtless movie that’s only wish is to hypnotize the herd-coward mentality of the American, certainly more in the conservative mid section, people into unconditionally believing in its message of blind patriotism.  Socrates warned his fellow Athenians about sheepishly going alone with the majority and without asking yourself ‘why am I going alone with this’.  Clearly in America, Socrates’ philosophical legacy is a forgotten piece history.

American Sniper, directed quite sloppily by Eastwood, holds no responsibility for telling a story that truthfully represents the world it is depicting.  If the movie was a fantasy or a comedy, exceptions can be made, but here, if they are dealing with honor in a real world scenario, then they owe it to their audience to be as forthcoming as they can about the historical record.   Instead the so-called ‘evil terrorists’ are shaded in black and nameless, faceless as they scurry around dilapidated buildings to kill ‘American freedom’, who they would have you believe, are good by virtue for simply being Americans.

Chris Kyle, in his autobiography, had no remorse and saw ‘the enemy as savages and despicably evil’ also saying his only regret was that ‘he didn’t kill more of them’, that he had ‘fun’ killing and that ‘if you see anyone from about sixteen to sixty-five and there male, shoot’em.  Kill every male you see’.  This is the great American Hero this movie is celebrating.  They should all be ashamed of themselves but the problem here is the filmmakers and actors are drinking the same FOX News, patriotic we-are-the-greatest-country-in-the-world bullshit as well.  Chris Kyle, a man with no imagination to speak of, was a sociopath that became a cardboard cut-out poster boy for the American Military Petroleum Complex.  He was trained to shoot the enemy so they could win a war that they started in the first place.  These so-called savages would have been just fine if the mass of the military power of the United States didn’t invade them for unsubstantiated reasons so they can take the poor country’s resources, specifically the oil.

There is no doubt that people in various parts of the world are subjected to horrible living conditions.  There are people living under strict religious and governmental dictatorships, but to say that the world power is there to help them and instead is actually there to rob them is the most immoral of deceptions.  Even the poor soldiers, along with Chris Kyle, don’t even know better because they were born into the lie of the American Dream, and that God is on their side so they must be right in this fight for liberty and freedom.

American Sniper is a cowardly boring movie.  It’s praying on the stupidity/patriotism of its simplistic audience rather than challenging them like much superior films like Three Kings and The Thin Red Line or even Hurt Locker for that matter.  Sadly a movie like American Sniper exists and is taken seriously by backward thinking Americans because these same people are unable to accept that the war in Iraq was a failure, it allows them to ignore the consequences of invading a country with no weapons of mass destruction and was not involved in 9/11.  Their fabricated livelihood is hinged on this massive lie that American is great and anything she does is in the spirit of the Christian God.  Otherwise they would have to except they are culpable for electing a government that is responsible for massive war crimes.  More Iraqi people were killed during the American invasion, starting in 2003 then Saddam Hussein was allegedly responsible for.

Like Zero Dark Thirty, but much worse, American Sniper turns Chris Kyle, a dehumanizing racist murderer, into a hero and the war in the Middle East into a virtuous fight for freedom to suit its own ideology.  Zero Dark Thirty was a convoluted mess about the hunt for Osama Bin Laden while justifying torture methods to get him, which have proven to yield little to no intelligence but don’t tell that to lawyers vindicating it to the President’s ear.  That film come off as complicated so all the simple people couldn’t keep up and then wrapped it’s story, ‘based on true events’ apparently, by capturing and killing the alleged mastermind of 9/11.

Like religion, American Sniper and movies like it have a purpose and that purpose is to string the lie along, so those who rule over us all can get away with murder by calling it an act of righteousness.  This movie transmogrifies real life into propagandized entertainment; it codifies truth to shape its narrative but ultimately at the expense of objectivity.  The problem is the movie remains one-sided throughout and leaves a message of morality and justification as it runs its credits.  The movie doesn’t bore us with all the political ramifications of invading a foreign land, or that many of those so-called terrorists are simply defending their land and their families.  The movie is quite clearly scared to death at the possibility of humanizing the Iraqis, people that have dreams for the best life possible for themselves and their families, not unlike any other place in the world.

American Sniper and the marksman on the trigger side of its crosshairs see the world in demarcated terms of good and evil.  The problem is the main character and the movie never see, and actually never want to, is the relativity of good and evil.  They turn their murderous cause into a virtue and then call it a 'true story' about the fight for freedom for the greatest nation on the planet.

“One of the hardest parts of my job is to connect Iraq to the war on terror.” 

- George W. Bush